Recent advances in genetic engineering and plant breeding have provided the prerequisite tools to transfer genes and regions of a genome in plants to improve certain phenotypes in plants. It is possible to produce plants with unique physiological and biochemical traits and characteristics of high agronomic importance. Traits that play an essential role in plant growth and development, as well as, crop yield, crop quality, and composition are desirable targets for crop plant improvement.
Evaluation of a limited number of modified plants is often done in a manner that compares a single modified event to a nonmodified control. In these evaluations, each event is well tracked and known throughout the evaluation. The goal of initial evaluations is often to identify if the gene or the genetic region has a biological effect for a trait of interest. Extensive evaluations of a large number of events can be limited because of the size of the field and the difficulty in environmental control of the fields under evaluation. Also extensive measurements of each replicate of a modified event often limits the total number of evaluations that can be done due to the large effort needed to consistently take such measurements.
Improvement of plants by plant breeding and other means is the hallmark of agricultural productivity in present times. A major part of this involves evaluation of large number of plants in a systematic manner. For these evaluations, plant populations or individual plants are evaluated by comparison with control plants or plant populations. Methods of evaluation are difficult and expensive because of many factors, for example space requirements imposed by nonrandom and systematic comparisons resulting in a large population of plants in a given test.
There are several methods of altering plants to select plants with improved or enhanced agronomic traits. One such method is by transforming a plant with one or more DNA molecules in a plant genome that is capable of producing a desired trait in the transformed plant compared to a non-transformed plant. Other methods of altering plants involve plant breeding where plants are crossed to produce progeny with different phenotypes to select desired plants. Plant breeding is sometimes assisted by one or more genetic markers or traits that serve especially to identify genes or traits linked with markers. Even in marker assisted plant breeding tracking of markers in a population of progeny results in exponential increment of cost imposed by tracking itself and space requirements.